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Baseball Round-Up: Part 2

Yesterday, we took a look at ESPN Major League Baseball from Sega and MVP Baseball 2004 from EA Sports. Today, our 2004 Baseball Round-Up concludes with a synopsis of MLB 2005, All Star Baseball 2005, and the text simulation Out of the Park Baseball 6.

989 Sports is the whipping boy for most sports gamers. It's been a long, long time since 989 and Sony released a game that garnered anything more than snickers from serious sports fans. The company's products are, quite simply, not very good.

MLB 2005 is the best 989 Sports game to hit the scene in years, and is one of the biggest and most pleasant surprises this baseball season.

The gameplay in MLB 2005 is surprisingly tight with very few areas of major complaint. The biggest stumbling blocks are the lack of walks (it's actually even a bit worse than MVP in this regard) and the fact that you cannot check your swing. This is almost inexcusable for a baseball game in this day and age not to allow you to hold up your swing. With the pitches coming in at a pretty fast clip, it makes hitting very frustrating at times.

The other area where MLB 2005 stumbles is that there is no gameplay customization whatsoever. Aside from levels of difficulty, there are no gameplay sliders or anything of that nature. You also cannot edit players or use created players in anything other than exhibition mode. Finally, the team rosters are a bit out of whack; it actually suffers from reverse MVP 2004 syndrome in that each team carries only 10 pitchers and 15 hitters.

It's a mystery as to why these run-of-the-mill features were left out, but the gameplay has improved so much over the past year that maybe they just plain ran out of time?

Graphics and animation are very well done (a whole lot better than ESPN Baseball); the signature batting stances are dead-on accurate. There's also a very good pace to the games and you can complete a full nine innings in about 30 minutes.

Online play is also definitely worth a look, and if you have a group of buddies that want to play online it's worth the price of admission for this feature alone. Online gameplay is smooth and relatively bug free.

One other interesting tidbit about MLB is that a hitter's "hot and cold zones" fluctuate during the course of a game and even during a season. So maybe Giambi's hot zone will be low and outside in May, but it'll be normal in July. It's a pretty cool feature that other games would do well to implement.

To top if all off, the game comes with a free coupon for a New Era baseball cap of any team of your choice. Pretty cool, eh?

Buy MLB 2005 if:

If you want to play a PS2 baseball game online this is the ticket. The role-playing career mode is very slick and the franchise mode extremely detailed, even though the lack of any editing capabilities hurts. No longer a laughing stock, MLB 2005 is certainly worth a rental at the very least.